The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has landed rovers on Mars, flown spacecrafts into orbit around mysterious worlds, and soon, they may even have parking that isn’t a complete mess.

Finding a spot at the NASA facility in the hills of La Canada Flintridge has been a headache for decades. The city-sized campus has more than 5,500 employees, before another 1,000 interns show up every summer.

“There’s a scarcity of parking, there are too many cars and not as many spaces,” said Laura Fisher, with JPL Spark, a division focused on innovations in the workforce.

More spaces aren’t planned, so JPL is looking to make lemonade with the unparked lemons they’ve got. Their high tech solution will combine sensors at the entrances and exits of each lot with an app that automatically directs employees to available parking.

The developers hope to add a feature in the future that would automatically update employees on which exit to use when driving to the campus based on current parking availability.

“People will know before they leave what the parking is like, and maybe they should telecommute that day,” Fisher said.

JPL has tried other solutions for their parking problem, including programs that encourage biking to work, ride sharing or using shuttle services from Metro Gold Line’s Del Mar Station and Caltech’s campus, Fisher said.

The app, expected to roll out in this month, started with an in-house competition. JPL settled on two proposals from radar engineer Nopasin Niamsuwan and Mihai Alex Ruber, an intern from UC San Diego.

Both of the winners are now aiding in the creation of the app.

“Almost every day, 30 minutes of my precious time is drained by this parking problem,” Niamsuwan said in an interview with JPL’s Universe newsletter. “I saw an opportunity to solve my own problem as well as other JPL colleagues’ at the same time.”

Ruber’s app, “Rocket Park,” sends out push notifications and recommends the best place to park at a given date and time. It even uses augmented reality to direct users to available spots. Ruber told the Universe newsletter he could imagine the technology eventually using heads-up displays on windshields, or guiding autonomous cars.

There’s even talk about using predictive data to study historically when and where parking is at its worst.

Not all of the features from the two proposals will make it into the final release. The app is expected to start out in a basic format and then become more advanced over time.

Some ideas could spin off into other projects, such as an idea for augmented reality app for guests at JPL’s annual open house, Fisher said.

The parking app will be pushed out automatically as an update to all JPL-issued phones later this month. Android and iOS versions will be released for non-JPL issued phones too.

The competition, and the resulting app, are exactly why Spark exists. By tapping into the creativity and genius of JPL’s employees, they can come up with solutions that make everyone’s work day better.

Jason Henry is a staff reporter for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Pasadena Star-News. He covers Pasadena, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech and the City of Industry. Raised in Ohio, Jason began his career at a suburban daily near Cleveland before moving to California in 2013. He is a self-identified technophile, data nerd and a wannabe drone pilot. The 2011 graduate of Bowling Green State University likes to shock his city friends by sharing his hometown's population.

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